


Unraveling

by dweebulous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 22:52:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1112463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dweebulous/pseuds/dweebulous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five vignettes, five senses, five times that things came together and things came apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unraveling

1\. It is the smell of sweat and tobacco he remembers most clearly, years later. And fresh mown grass, and that particular apple-scented wood polish that the Quidditch players used on their broom handles. Surely they couldn’t smell it, then, behind the shed with their backs pressed to the wall. But he remembers it now, just the same. A patchwork memory, a few pieces strung together into what he thinks of as a whole. That’s how memory works, isn’t it?  
    But he can remember the smell of apples so clearly, a crisp and alive sort of smell. A nearly-summertime end of semester smell. The smell of being fourteen and sitting with your back to a wood shed passing a cigarette back and forth. Of knowing there were enough cigarettes left over that you could each have your own, but that it felt much better to have just one, to brush each other’s fingers as you pass it, to imagine the other’s lips as your own close around the filter.  
    That was back before any of it. Before even a kiss. Sometimes now, in the early mornings or very late at night when he permits himself to consider those sorts of things, he wonders if he would go back and stop it all. If he could get his hands on a time turner, could he shatter whatever’s growing between those two teenage boys as they breath in smoke and apples? Would he have the heart to destroy them before they destroy each other? He had to stop smoking cigarettes, after everything happened, because every inhale felt like he was breathing in a ghost.

2\. The taste of firewhiskey with a tang from a metal flask, passed back and forth in a closed-off corridor with one torch lit on the wall. The liquor tasted burnt and heavy, weighed down in his chest and made his head feel like it was swimming. But a pleasantness, too, like dark chocolate or the smell of oak. Something that anchored him even as he felt like he might just float away.  
    Fifteen, a prefect. Sirius kept reminding him of that. _Never gonna get head boy this way, hanging 'round me_ , he kept raising his perfect eyebrows, quirking his perfect lips. Every part of him was so perfect, so frustrating, with his leather jacket and his well-timed classroom jokes and his ability to charm even the toughest of professors, even McGonagall, who had once blushed when he’d winked at her during a lecture (and then promptly given him detention). Everything came so easy to Sirius, like life was a race you could just lope through. Like you never got short of breath, like you never wondered where the finish line was. How was Remus supposed to keep up with that? He had to study so hard to keep his head above water, and he had to move so fast to keep up with his friends.  
    Which was why it was surprising, that night, that Remus was the one to lean in first. So tentative, chapped lips barely brushing. And then the taste of whiskey, dark and comforting, like dark chocolate, like dark corridors, like dark eyes and dark hair and dark, private little laughs breathed onto each other’s mouths. That was the first time, drunk and young and so deliriously happy, so relieved that it had finally come to this inevitable end.

3\. He remembers the sound of a fist against a wooden door, again and again. The sound of splintering, the crack of knuckles, his own heart beating too loud in his ears. They’d been in an old charms classroom after hours, and now he can only remember snippets of their fight, his own words— _you bloody asshole¬—I can’t believe you—with her—what even am I to you?_ And Sirius’s reply, louder and louder— _it was nothing, it was just a laugh—you’re not my_ girlfriend _Moony—Merlin, shut up! Shut up!_  
    But he does remember the words that set everything over the edge. His own words, not a yell, surprisingly quiet. _You’re a fucking fag who keeps lying to himself,_ he’d said (why would he say that, how could he say that?) _And you are always going to be unhappy and you are always going to hate yourself._  
      He remembers the silence afterwards—it must have only been an instant, but in his mind it stretches for ages. And he can see Sirius’s face, still, sixteen and shocked. Sixteen and resigned. Sixteen and so tired.  
    Now, he remembers the shift in the world that year. The way the atmosphere turned so dark, so frightening. Past the bravado and the pranks and their own golden youth, there were dark things filling in the cracks. Reports of deaths and disappearances, names that could not be said. They were going steadily towards a war even as they sat in the common room, even as they looked out the window during divination, even as they sneaked out of the dormitory in the middle of the night—quiet, quiet so as to not wake James or Peter—and met in dark corridors and didn’t speak, not then, when they didn’t have to. And who was to blame any teenage boy for needing every distraction they could find, for being cruel and hurtful, because what else was there?  
    Because after that silence, Sirius slammed his fist into the door of the classroom again and again. He did not yell or curse; it was just the sound of skin and bone pounding again and again into the wood, tearing into his flesh, leaving the threshold dappled with blood. And Remus did not tell him to stop. He did not grab his arm and wrench his fist away, did not press his lips to the bloody knuckles. He just stood and watched, his own hands limp at his sides. Because this was another distraction, too. This was another thing that would end up not mattering, until it did.

4\. He remembers the sight of each hair up close on Sirius’s arms, of the way his lips looked chapped in the summer, of his dark eyelashes with his eyes opened and closed. It’s that seventeenth summer he tries not to remember, when they first bought their flat, when it was so hot that they were almost always naked and they were almost always laughing about it and things were bad, yeah, but things were not that bad when there was still whiskey and sex and mornings they would just lay together, memorizing those little details of each other’s bodies—a scar on a forearm, a mole on a ribcage. And it was the first time Remus can remember feeling happy with his body, stitched and torn though it was. It was the first time he remembered feeling proud of inhabiting his own skin.  
    They lived there until the end, but it was not always a happy place. They were not always quiet and content in each other’s company. By the end they were not speaking. By the end the secrets had piled up into barricades, and they hurt each other just by breathing in bed not-quite touching. He’d wondered, sometimes, if Sirius would betray them. He’d wondered about the man’s anger, about his family history, about some of the racist and violent things he would say so casually at dinner, or late at night. And before, he’d always told himself that Sirius had just been raised differently, that he just needed to be called out on those things and told they were wrong. Because Sirius loved his friends in a fierce, wild way—Sirius would die before he betrayed any of the Order, and especially any of the marauders. But of course that was not true. They’d all been stupid, and they had paid the price.  
    This is what Remus wonders, now—would he have killed Sirius in bed next to him, if he had known? Could he have slit his throat, or pressed a pillow over his sleeping face, to stop what was going to happen over the next four years? Could he have done something, back when they were happy, back when they counted freckles on shoulder blades? Because that is the only chance, he knows, where there is still time. One of those quiet moments, when he was so happy, when he felt so loved—that would have been his chance to save them all. Of course, he had no way to know.  
    He wonders this, too: why he was spared. Why hadn’t Sirius betrayed him, too? Why hadn’t he killed him in the night, with a silent curse, with a hand pressed to a mouth? Part of him still thinks in words like love and protection, but the other half wonders if maybe in the end, he wasn’t worth it.

5\. He remembers the feel of a small hand in his own, palm on palm, a handshake far too confident for an eleven year old boy. He remembers that even then, Sirius had been unnaturally handsome, had held his head in a haughty way and had attracted the attention of the other students in the common room. A Black, from a long bloodline, being sorted into Gryffindor. Good on you, mate, the older boys had said to him, clapping him on the shoulder. The girls had teased him, called him a heartbreaker, said the first-year girls would need to watch out.  
    Remus had been quiet. He’d been conditioned to blend in, to attract so little attention as to not be noticed at all. He’d been sitting in one of the armchairs farthest from the fire, on the edge of the celebration taking place after the start-of-term feast, and he’d been wondering if the healing scratch stretching from left to right across the bridge of his nose was noticeable in the half-light of the corner. And that’s when Sirius Black had walked over, cocking his head slightly to the left, looking over Remus’s shabby secondhand school sweater, and the way his skinny arms were crossed subconsciously across his chest. And he’d thought, surely, he was about to be made fun of. Surely he was about to be bullied. Because that was how he’d known kids in the past—to throw a rock, to hurl a name.  
    But this boy held out his hand, so confident, so sure. He smiled without any irony, without any threat. And he said “I’m Sirius Black. I guess we’re going to be roommates.”  
Remus had stuck his hand out, had gripped the other in surprise. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we are.”


End file.
